Science these days

I was going to write about "Learning How to Care," but my thoughts have turned in another direction (which they do every few seconds).

Today I would like to focus on the scientific monopoly of knowledge, ideology and world-view within present-day society and over the individuals which compose it.

The first statement I would like to make is that this monopoly/dominance is revealing itself "these days" to be completely arbitrary and largely based on the wealth and power that back the egos of leading scientific figures and their apologists. What this arbitrary and omnipresent mode of apprehending the universe does is disguise, limit and suppress imaginative faculties (in part, I believe, because corporate and government science lacks the ability to use such faculties).

Historically speaking, (and who does not like to speak historically) science has leaned heavily on imagination and intuition to advance itself. The greatest physicists and chemists have admitted that dreams and intuition are essential to the expansion of knowledge. A physics student I knew in college once recommended that I trip on acid. Ideas do not readily suggest themselves from a mass of more or less partial or conflicting data. Humanity regularly used magic, intuition and life knowledge to understand relationships among people and with nature. These were the antecedents of the science of today and may be the direction we as a species are moving towards once more.

As I will readily admit, I have sometimes done better by science than I would have otherwise. In particular I am thinking of the time that I didn't know whether to take my hormone shot because I didn't know whether it would cause an unfortunate drug interaction. The doctor asked me what I wanted to do and I blubbered. He gave a humph and suggested a course of action, which I then accepted.

So, that was good for me. Of course the fact that there was an unknown drug interaction was in part an artifact of their being no research on combinations of injectable estrogen with other drugs. This derives from the disregard that mainstream science places on less profitable populations. Narrowly focused research itself is an example of a lack of imagination (at best).

This is all a longwinded way of saying, without referring to the terrific amount of legal influence some forms of science have, e.g., psychiatry and substance abuse; drug companies and their sales divisions; that science and scientists have a lack of self-awareness and perception that brings knowledge and conclusions that may be counter-intuitive or less than obvious to an "empirical" eye.

We are all paying the price (certainly I am) in the lack of holistic thinking on such matters as drug research. One doctor frankly told me that "no one knows" how all these drugs we are using interact or what the ultimate results will be for species health. I find this very scary. There is a kind of reptilianism at work here, pace CEG and David Icke.

The trouble is that holistic thinking would lead back to the social inequities and individual claims, needs and capabilities that paid-for science ignores. And it would demand a revolution in the relationship between ordinary perceptions, which tend to be more rooted in life and its concrete circumstaances and abstract theory and evidence-gathering to support such theories. There is an everyday experience of the nonnormal and paranormal that science ruthlessly suppressed on behalf of its social position for centuries that, as is well known erased female influence from the ranks of science for generations.

I believe that the inner knowledge that each of us have if only we pay attention to it forms at least as important a source of inquiry as measurable, quantitative information. I also think that with all the crises evincing themselves in the world that it is vital for people to turn within and to each other for answers and to fight against scientific monopolies in politics, behavior, health and spiritual commitment.

It's better to be open to all influences that have their roots in the elements that constitute life and being, at least for the purposes of discerning what path to take, what light(s) suit which situations and facts than to build up a collapsible structure which will take us all down with it.

I wish I knew more so I could provide a more coherent conclusion.

Trust your own perceptions! That's one.